1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to digital image processing technology, and more particularly, to detection and correction of imperfections on a digital facial image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Correcting photographs of people's faces has been done since invention of photography. Human portraits were always corrected in order not to show things like bumps, birth marks, pimples, freckles, wrinkles, etc. The photographs were corrected manually and corrections were made on the actual photographs or on negatives or films by hand. This was always a tedious process requiring special artistic skill.
With the arrival of a digital photography a need to correct or improve pictures of human faces remained the same. Numerous digital photo editor kits exist, such as Adobe Photoshop™. The photo editors perform image corrections by automatically correcting white balance and setting the most natural colors. They also allow users to perform similar operations with the digital images as the photographers of the past did by hand. For example, a user can select a desired color and air brush or cover up anything on the digital portrait using this color “paint.” However, it remains essentially somewhat of a tedious manual process that also takes a lot of time and requires special skills.
For example, digitally removing or even partially covering up freckles on an image of a human face can take a long time. Yet, depending on a photo editor used and a skill of the person using it, a face still looks more or less artificial on the portrait. In other words, the human face on a digital picture looks unnatural and it can be seen that the image was “doctored.” These altered images are often referred to as having been “photoshopped.”
Most of these visually recognizable corrections to the image are caused by the manual nature of these corrections, for example, a user trying to cover up a pimple on a digital image of a face. Typically, the user selects a color and a place where he wants to apply the color brush. Therefore, the corrected image only looks as good as user's color perception and hand accuracy.
It is apparent that improved automated techniques for improving the portrait images are desired. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method that addresses the need for automatic recognition and correction of the undesirable features of portrait images.